How To Get FREE SSL Certificate For WordPress (3 Simple Steps)
The Objective
In this tutorial, I will guide you on how to get free SSL certificate for WordPress in just 3 simple steps and it will also automatically renew for you for as long as 15 years.
If you prefer on visual mode, watch the tutorial video below:
Step 1: Create A Free Cloudflare Account
- Go to Cloudflare and create a free account, just follow the on-screen instruction you are good to go.
- After that, add your website domain to your Cloudflare account and select the free package plan.
- Next, Cloudflare will scan your website DNS. After the scan finish, you will get 2 new nameservers
- Update the 2 new Cloudflare nameservers to your domain registrar. It will take any duration from few minutes to 48 hours to propagate the nameserver update.
- After some time, go back to your Cloudflare account and you will see a message notice that your website have been added. Then, click on SSL settings to select flexible mode.
Step 2: Your Website Settings
- Login to your WordPress dashboard and install “Flexible SSL for Cloudflare” and “Really Simple SSL” plugins and activate them.
- After you actived Really Simple SSL plugin, you will redirect to login screen again for you to login to your dashboard again with the HTTPS URL for your domain name.
- Note: you might get an error on your website running on HTTPS due to the propagation have not fully completed worldwide. This error will be solved after the DNS is fully propagated worldwide.
- If you are interested to switch your current “Flexible” SSL mode to “Full” encryption mode, continue to step 3.
Step 3: Full SSL mode
“Flexible” mode will only encrypt between your visitor and Cloudflare, but the “Full” mode will encrypt your visitor with Cloudflare and also encrypt Cloudflare to your website to have full encryption.
- Go to Cloudflare SSL mode to select “Full” mode.
- Then, select “Original Server” tab under SSL/TLS settings.
- Click “Create Certificate” and select “RSA” and click “Next”. After that, you with get the generated certificate code to install to your hosting.
- Next, login to your hosting CPanel and look for SSL/TLS settings and go to manage SSL.
- From here select the domain name that you want to install the certificate and paste all the 3 certificate codes in here (Certificate – CRT), (Private Key – KEY) and (CABUNDLE)
- For (CABUNDLE) certificate, go back to Cloudflare certificate page and scroll down and click on “Original CA Certificate”
- At the next page, click on step 4 and select “RSA Root” and copy the code to install in your hosting.
- Finally, click on “Install Certificate” and you will see certificate installed successfully message.
- You may check the certificate details for the expiring date and hoo-hoo, you will see the certificate expiring date is 15 years.
Note: you might get an error on your website running on HTTPS due to it will take some time for your hosting to install the certificates.
Conclusion
I suggest you always use the full Cloudflare encryption mode for best practice. If your hosting comes with SSL certificate you may skip Step 3 and directly switch to full SSL mode in Cloudflare.
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